Page:The sleeping beauty (IA sleepingbeauty00evanrich).pdf/84



HUNDRED years passed away. At the end of that time it happened one day that a young Prince who was hunting in the neighbourhood caught sight of the towers of the enchanted castle rising above the dense forest. He had never been in that part of the country before, and had heard nothing of the story of the Sleeping Princess, so he asked the first people he met what those towers were, and to whom the castle belonged.

Everybody told him a different tale. One said that it was an old castle haunted by spirits; another, that it was a meeting-place for all the witches and sorcerers in the land, who gathered there to practise their secret rites.

“No, no,” said a third. “That castle is the home of a giant, and all the people in these parts are very much afraid of him, so I have been told, because he steals their cattle and their crops, and even carries off their children to be his servants. And they cannot go to the rescue of those he has imprisoned in this way, because of the forest all round the castle, which is so dense that nobody can force his way through.